Virus News
Answers.com hit by BlackHole
In the morning of May 12th our malware outbreak sensors registered another BlackHole outbreak hitting one of the Top 200 Alexa rank domains: Answers.com. Its RSS feed generated resource was infected with BlackHole exploit kit. The XML output file at the URL feeds.answers.com was prepended with an obfuscated JavaScript. The malicious code looks like this: [...]
AVG Reports First Quarter 2012 Financial Results
AVG announced its first quarter results on May 10. “AVG’s solid execution across the board drove strong first quarter financial results and marked a healthy start to 2012. We are pleased with our financial performance and the fact that we have exceeded our Q1 expectations,” stated J.R. Smith, chief executive officer of AVG. “During the quarter, [...]
AVG Web Threat Update: Week 16
1. Spreading the Blackhole love on Twitter The AVG Web Threats Research team found this little landmine on Twitter in the last week. We suspect it was planted by a Blackhole operator. Clicking on the “free Antivirus” link takes you to the nearly inevitable: And, if an unsuspecting Twitter user is [...]
AVG CodeWord: Cookies
What are cookies and what should users know about handling them? Almost every PC user will have at some point or another come across cookies when using a browser to surf the Internet. Do you want to accept cookies? Do you want to enable cookies, block cookies and of course delete cookies? These are [...]
AVG Threatwatch Week: 16
Android malware poses as Angry Birds Space game What’s the story? The latest version of the immensely popular “Angry Birds” series has already seen fake imitations in the Android Marketplace. The infected version of the fake “Angry Birds Space” contains a Trojan which security company Sophos has detected as Andr/KongFu-L. While the imitation appears to be [...]
New fake antivirus spam hits Twitter
What’s the story? A new wave of spam has hit the popular social network Twitter which pushes advertisements for a free and “proven” antivirus. The link is malicious and the antivirus is fake. So far over 500 Twitter accounts have clocked up over 4000 tweets of this spam message and that number is rising fast [...]
Are you checking your teens Facebook profile?
Our fifth Digital Diaries study “Digital Coming of Age” throws up some really interesting new stats about how todays’ parents perceive their teens’ online activity. One of the most surprising statistics is that half of parents around the world check up on their kids Facebook accounts…secretly! But is that a surprise? AVG’s security [...]
Trusted exe along with the malware
Nowadays as more and more people are aware of malware infections, untrusted executable file is less likely to be executed by the user. Except when the executable is trusted, signed by a known company, or from a well-known software vendor for example. But even when the executable file is signed it might not be safe [...]
AVG CodeWord: Update – Apple Mac OS X
Apple provides users of its OS X operating system with a Software Update feature which is run at defined intervals, but which may be accessed manually at any time by visiting the (?) menu and selecting Software Update. If you have set your Software Update preferences to run weekly then you see a list [...]
Weekly Threat Update: Week 14
1. eBay.co.uk listing redirecting bidders to exploit kit AVG analysts have discovered an ebay.co.uk auction listing that is redirecting bidders to a Blackhole exploit kit. After visiting the listing, users are redirected to an ebay.666222666.com site that is hosting the exploit kit. At this point they are served malicious .JAR (Java), .SWF (Adobe [...]